Emily Gowen serves as an Assistant Director of Studies and a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. Her book-in-progress was awarded the 2023 SHEAR dissertation prize and will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Prior to beginning at Harvard, she was the 2022-23 John B. Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. She holds a PhD in English and American Literature from Boston University, where she taught in the English department and Writing Program. She has held research fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the BU Center for the Humanities. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in ELH, American Literature, J19, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Early American Literature, Western American Literature, The Journal of American Studies, and several online outlets. Her work explores the intersections of the rise of the novel, the history of print, and the problem of social inequality in the nineteenth-century United States.

Contact her at emtgowen [at] gmail.com